Feature
Jingle tills
by Denis Welch
With Santa now bigger than Jesus, is the Christian Christmas on the way out?
Christianity is on its way to being a minority religion in New Zealand. The latest census figures show that barely half of us choose to affiliate ourselves with a Christian church, and the long-term trend suggests that by 2011, the year of the next census, that figure will have slipped below 50%. Sure, there are still more than a million Anglicans and Catholics, but the percentages of Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims are soaring, while a whopping 36% of New Zealanders are happy to declare that they have no religion at all.
And those are just the figures for nominal affiliation to a particular creed or denomination. Many people will say, for instance, “Anglican” to the census question because they were brought up that way; in practice they no longer know their litany from their liturgy. The proportion of Christians who go to church every Sunday is estimated to be only 10-15%, though maybe 20% would have a church connection at least once a month.
Even the traditional surge of churchgoing at Christmas time has diminished: once, says religion scholar Peter Lineham, it would have been way out of proportion to the rest of the year; now it’s more like a doubling at best. And when people do go to, say, a midnight mass, they are more inclined to give the swerve to the “Christian hocus-pocus stuff” – ie, communion – and leave after the carol-singing.
Ah yes, the hocus-pocus stuff. Our appetite for such things seems to have been transferred to fantasy films, books and games; in these PC times, the spiritual elements of Christmas and Christianity are being de-emphasised for fear of causing offence. Even pagan festivals are not immune: some American schools are replacing Halloween celebrations with less spooky “Fall-o-ween” events that don’t scare anyone, let alone little kids.
As head of Massey University’s School of Social and Cultural Studies, Lineham has been churchwatching for a long time, and to him and other observers the trend is inescapable: Christmas is becoming more and more secularised. “Overall,” he says, “I think that the religion of Santa is ahead of the religion of Christianity.”
The more aggressively market-minded churches buy into that, says Lineham: the pentecostals and the evangelicals “go for quite a sugar-coated version” of Christmas in order to entice people through their doors. On Auckland’s North Shore, which he calls an evangelical enclave, some churches do fantastic light displays: “They do as much a commercialisation of Christmas as the stores, because they see that being in on the fun is part of the secret.”
(Such churches pay a long-term price for such enticements, however: their turnover of adherents is generally greater than that of the older, more mainstream churches – as much as 40% a year in some cases. One US estimate puts the average duration of evangelical or pentecostal church membership at just four years.)
So if Santa’s bigger than Jesus, and fewer and fewer of us bother to acknow_ledge the latter’s birthday in a Christian or even religious way, how relevant is Christmas any more? Might it eventually become little more than a public holiday, with the Maori festival Matariki emerging as a more appropriate midwinter festival of rebirth? Both Lineham and Paul Morris, professor of religious studies at Victoria University, disagree.
Lineham says Christmas is too deeply rooted in our culture to be easily dislodged, while Morris points out that the Christian spirit of giving is still very much alive: you see it all over town at this time of year, with people thronging the shops to buy stuff for each other. Indeed, the first Christmas presents were given by the Three Wise Men, who went to some trouble to bring gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Bethlehem manger.
And as for fears that Christmas is becoming grossly commercialised, Morris says it has been commercialised since at least the fourth century, when people making pilgrimages to Jerusalem found themselves being charged triple for accommodation.
Overall, there’s undoubtedly a declining sense of denomination among congregants. There are far fewer precise divisions on doctrine, says Lineham; most churches now have a smorgasbord of values and beliefs.
But barbecue or smorgasbord, or just the roast on the table, we still care enough to make a special ritual out of Christmas. As Morris says, it represents the very origin of our kind of society.
